As most of us here might have noticed we recently had a little bit of turmoil due to talks about the possibility of a blacklist functionality implementation.
During this conversation one user pointed out that this is actually something that is already implemented on Harmony ONE.
This was the posted link:
According to the explanation every transaction passes through this function to see if it’s blacklisted. If it is, it will not processed. This essentially freezes the wallet in a similar way as a bank can freeze your account.
Can we get clarifications on the team of who has the ability to trigger this function?
What are the thoughts of the the community over the fact that the Harmony team maybe able to freeze their wallet funds at any given moment?
Try to keep this civil since this was a hot theme just a day ago.
Give your opinions in a concise way and if anyone of the team could comment on this I would appreciate it very much.
There is a reason for the HIP-17 to find a solution how to proceed with this in the future. And after @sophoah came up in the previous good conversation that only leader node need to add I was strongly aware of a huge problem that’s open and can be misused if HIP-18 & HIP-19 go through. That’s why we need good conversations and constructive feedback to solve HIP-16 and HIP-17 but both are very harsh topics and some people are going much further and even get personally instead of thinking off we all have the same targets.
Just to say the blacklist was not used after implement in 2020, you can all check this on GitHub (because we are permissionless and so transparent) Polyplay was asking when those ONE was still in Mainnet
Thank you for reaching out. I understand it’s not used as by ethics as @ben2k_Stakeridoo showed in the chat conversation.
But I wonder if we should rely on your good faith or the good faith of the future people that might come after the current Harmony team. We know these things change, now we might have great people that we can trust ahead of the team. But this might change eventually and some one could abuse this code.
Is this something that if we, as a community discussed and agreed upon, something that would be feasible for the developers to remove from the code?
I think it would be very beneficial both in terms of insuring we continue to be free from censorship. As it was pointed out by someone on the @ben2k_Stakeridoo chat conversation this is something the Harmony team respects very strictly. So by removing it it would not be the case anymore that it’s based on trust but something that the code insures that continue to be the case by not having the functionality in the first place.
Would also like to add that isn’t this functionality essentially something that invalidates decentralization? Because if some authority would force the person with authority to alter this text document that lists the blacklisted addresses into, say, blocking them all, that alone would halt the blockchain as a whole? Or this would only affect validators updated to the latest change? I am not very experienced with these things. Sorry for my ignorance, trying to think through possible issues.
